‘You are the pagan Pope,’ Tully said.
‘Better than no Pope at all,’ said Tibbs.
The guy behind the counter frowned as we entered. He was playing a song by the Ex about the Spanish Civil War and Tibbs went to shake his hand and the guy avoided it by straightening up and clasping his hands behind his head. He was cool and his jacket had nothing of the home catalogue about it.
‘Live on your feet,’ Tibbs Lennox sang, smiling and bobbing. He pointed in the faces of nearby customers. ‘For no one is a slave.’
‘Safe,’ said the shopkeeper-guy. ‘But we’re all out of Kajagoogoo, if that’s what you boys are looking for.’
‘Very funny,’ Tibbs said.
‘Where you lot from?’ asked a guy leaning on the counter. He had mirror badges on a white denim jacket and a feather earring.
‘They’re from Rottenrow,’ Tully said to him. ‘I’m from Los Angeles.’
‘Here for G-Mex?’
‘They are,’ Tully replied. ‘I’m here for the ale. For the revolution. And for hot dalliances with the ladies of the vicinity.’
The shopkeeper rolled his eyes and reached for the turntable, putting on a new single by the Wedding Present.
‘He got a D in home economics,’ Limbo said to the customer. He rubbed Tully’s hair just to show them that we knew how to be friendly.
‘Watch the barnet, ya dickpiece,’ Tully said.
‘He’s a bit on the touchy side,’ the customer said.
‘He doesn’t know the capital of France,’ Limbo said, pointing at Tully. ‘He’s king of the remedial class. The Funny Farm. Very sad.’
‘Shut it,’ Tully said.
‘What you doing tonight?’ the customer asked.
‘Shop Assistants,’ I said. ‘At the International.’
The customer flicked his earring and gave a look to the shopkeeper-guy. ‘Foof,’ he said, as if we’d just fallen into a swamp.
The shopkeeper looked on, bored senseless by way of profession.
‘Shambling post-punk garbage,’ he said.
Tully looked at him. ‘Jesus Christ, mate. Are you trying to sell records, or what? I congratulate you on being the World’s Worst Capitalist.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said the shopkeeper-guy. At that point, Tully turned to a girl with black lipstick who was flicking through the LPs.
‘Do you know any good pubs round here?’ he asked. ‘We’re only here for the beer.’
‘Different from Scotland. Pubs shut at three,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘English drinking hours.’
‘Shit, I hadn’t thought of that,’ I said.
‘We need to set ourselves up,’ Tully said impatiently. ‘Make a plan. Find out where the drink is and find out where this gig is tonight.’
The boys spread over the shop like a contagion of acumen. The LPs in the bins had handwritten comments by the staff. ‘No other sound matters,’ one of them had scrawled and pinned to a Velvet Underground album. ‘The truth. The darkness. More.’ On a UK Subs record they had written, ‘Vulgarity rules’. The walls were covered in posters Blu-Tacked next to adverts for used guitars and bands seeking singers. ‘Influences: Dolls, Ziggy, Morrissey.’ Limbo leaned against a Hüsker Dü poster and slugged from a quarter-bottle of whisky. I was inspecting the run-out groove on a single when he started blethering and guffawing like a madman and sort of dancing. Nothing made sense. ‘Like James Dean, like James Dean, like James Dean, you’re a penis.’
‘Ah, modern poetry,’ I said. ‘Is it Ezra Pound?’ He lunged across the shop and got me in a headlock, pressing the bottle on me.
‘You’re boyishly handsome yet tensely American,’ he mewled, ‘but would you survive in the trenches, mon frère? I fear not. Get a large dug up you.’
‘Is he saying dog?’ asked Feather Earring.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Sorry to geg in, lads,’ the shopkeeper-guy said. ‘But could you just eff off now out of the shop? You’re causing chaos.’
‘Thought that was the point, mister,’ Limbo said.
Ignoring the shopkeeper’s main point, or embodying it, Tully leaned both arms on the counter to explain in florid detail how Prince was shite. Hogg was, by this point, rummaging in his bag for money, ready to spend a week’s wages on German imports by Einstürzende Neubauten. He placed an example on the counter, Wrench, the bootleg of a gig in Japan where the band tore up the stage with power drills.
‘Forget the Purple One,’ Tully said to the shopkeeper, concluding his case, ‘this guy prefers bands who make their own instruments.’
‘Commercially available instruments,’ Hogg replied, very solemnly, ‘are a panacea to the assumptions of the bourgeois class.’
‘A bit like your Capri,’ Tully said, heading for the door.
‘Fuck off.’
Hogg wasn’t getting much joy from the shopkeeper, but he hung around for another minute or two, scavenging for status, I chose to imagine, or hoping for a sudden, late flowering of admiration. Receiving neither, and fed up with the guy’s attitude, he swung his bag of self-defining treats and left the shop.
I walked up to the counter. Limbo was buying a badge. He was hopping on the spot with mysterious anticipation. Taking the money, the shopkeeper rolled his eyes. ‘I’ve heard it all before,’ he said. ‘Weekend punks on the lash.’
Limbo wandered to the threshold, then turned around. ‘Dear sir,’ he said. ‘Please do me the honour of getting a dug up you!’
I was the only one of the Scots left in the shop. I’d deliberately hung back to talk to him and get information about where to go. I lifted one of the fanzines from the counter and flicked through it, then paid in silence. I always got nervous in record shops. The last two customers left and the shopkeeper seemed relieved.
‘I’m sorry for all the ruckus,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry about it. It’s the Festival of the Tenth Summer. Was always going to happen.’
‘Are you involved in it?’
He gripped the black counter and smiled for the first time since we’d come in. ‘I was one of the advisers,’ he said. ‘And you wouldn’t believe the meetings. Organisers talking about postmodernism. Talking about praxis. And when it comes down to it, it’s just a horde of pissed lads like you lot roaming around the city.’ I smirked as he shook his head and started shelving records behind him.
‘So, where do we go?’ I asked.
‘Mess about for a bit, then go to the Britannia Hotel.’ He shook his head again and I thanked him.
*
I felt I was already one of the necessary people of the city. Standing outside the record shop, in the warmth, in the haze, I could see the warehouses and department stores overlooking Piccadilly Gardens. I tried to picture the workers inside those buildings, and wondered if they too were excited for the weekend. The hedge across from me was somehow greener than the average hedge and the road was busy with buses and Manchester was everything. I just paused for a second, standing there, and realised I was ‘in it’, part of the city right then, and part of the history we were here to celebrate. Whether illusory or not, a huge democratic feeling arrived on the air and I breathed it in before going in search of the others.
They were just down the street, in Spudulike. Problem: they didn’t allow drinking inside the shop and Limbo had found a possible supplier of cider. ‘What if I pour it into paper cups?’ he asked the girl at the till, while making signals to a homeless-looking man outside the window.
‘Nah, mate,’ the girl said. ‘I’ll get the sack.’
‘Just forget about it, Limbo,’ Tibbs said. He turned to the girl. ‘I’m Tyrone.’ When they got talking, he asked her if she preferred A Taste of Honey or This Sporting Life, like it was a crucial question for everyone. He didn’t get far with that so he asked her if she knew the location of the venue for that night’s gig.
‘Come again?’ she said.
‘The International Club. That’s tonigh
t. Tomorrow we’re heading to the Festival of the Tenth Summer, at G-Mex.’
‘The tenth what?’
‘Anniversary of punk rock,’ he said. ‘But that’s tomorrow. Like I say, tonight we’re heading to the International.’
She pondered. ‘Oh, I know …’ She looked over her shoulder and shouted to the middle-aged lady decanting the coleslaw. ‘Mavis, these lads are heading to the International in a bit. That’s in Rusholme, aren’t it?’ She didn’t wait for a reply and told us she went swimming near there. ‘It’s in Anson Road,’ she added. Tibbs then chanced his arm and asked for her phone number but she just stared at him.
‘Come on,’ he said.
‘Shurrup and go and eat your spud,’ she said. ‘Lovely eyes, though. I know what you Scottish lads are like.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m not being cheeky, but can we stay at yours tonight? We’re out-of-towners without a pillow between us.’
‘You must be mad.’ She lifted a few dirty trays before going behind the hatch to join Mavis.
‘I’m definitely on my own in this world,’ Tibbs said.
Soon Tibbs, Hogg, Tully, and I were driving the plastic knives and forks deep into the slurry of our Styrofoam boxes. But Limbo could not be told – it was a general rule in our lives – so in fifteen minutes or so he returned to the shop, not with the promised cider but with a bottle of red wine, which had emerged from his negotiations with the dosser outside. He was grinning as if this happy outcome had been written in the stars. The wine said Fitou on the label and it was already open.
‘Guy had his own corkscrew,’ Limbo said.
‘First-class service,’ said Tully, his box lid squeaking as he closed it. Then he climbed out of the booth and sauntered up to the serving hatch to charm the girl for cups. He also got her phone number.
‘Fuckan dimples,’ Tibbs said.
Tully set up two cups in front of us. I can still see them: the two cups full of Limbo’s wine now sitting forever on the table.
‘What’s Fitou?’ I asked.
‘It’s red wine they produce in Motherwell,’ Tully joked, gulping from one and then sipping from the other and passing them round.
Suddenly there was a figure standing by our table. It was Bobby McCloy, alias Dr Clogs, an Ayrshire comrade. He was unexpected.
‘Okay, fuckwits. Here we are in Manchester,’ Dr Clogs said, ‘home of the Hacienda. What’s the script?’
‘Jesus Christ, Clogs,’ Tully said. ‘How did you know where to find us?’
‘It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes,’ he said. ‘Piccadilly Records. I knew you were on the ten o’clock bus. Your mother grassed on you.’
Top marks to him: he’d found out our whole itinerary on the grapevine and just showed up. He offered very little in the way of explanation. He grinned, and from his inside pocket he produced a noxious sherry-like liquid called Four Crown, a favourite, Tully insisted, among Glasgow tramps.
‘Give us a slug,’ Tibbs said, taking the bottle.
‘And you scored a ticket?’ I said, looking at Clogs.
‘Had one for months,’ he said. He touched the side of his nose. ‘Keeping it dark, young James. You never know who’s watching you.’ He dragged over a chair and sat there like Che Guevara in his jungle threads: camouflage jacket, green army shirt, black jeans, beetle-crusher shoes.
‘You’re a brilliant fuckan weirdo,’ Tully said.
Our friend believed chiefly in the Birthday Party and Kraftwerk. His other main obsession was the Apple II computer humming in his dad’s garage. He dyed his hair black, as many did, and had small tolerance for the small-minded, being generally ill-disposed to people in general, or people he wasn’t already on bottle-sharing and swearing terms with. He could be entertainingly dismissive in a deadpan way and his stock-in-trade was mockery. Mainly, he was independent. He sat inside the house playing Metroid for the second half of the Eighties, learning how to code.
‘Welcome, Clogs, to this band of brothers,’ said Limbo. ‘We have a plan to deflower the city and not sleep for forty-eight hours.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ I said. ‘I fully intend to repair to that park over the way in a minute and settle down for an afternoon nap.’
‘Poof,’ Limbo said, knocking back a cup of wine and breaking into a horrible song called ‘We Built This City’.
‘What’s that?’ Tully asked, flicking one of the newcomer’s badges.
‘A rare token of New York’s subculture,’ Clogs said, unscrewing the cap of his sherry. ‘As you well know, it’s no optical illusion. If I’m not mistaken, wee man, it says “Patti Smith, Horses”.’
‘Horses, horses – horseshit,’ Tully said. He took the bottle off him and had a swig. ‘You’ll be arguing for David Bowie next.’
‘And all these badges,’ Tibbs added, ‘are a complete betrayal of the British working class. Not a single one for the miners.’
‘He probably loves Ronald Reagan,’ I added, looking into a mess of beans. ‘I feel Clogs has strayed very far from the programme and is guilty of crimes.’ Tibbs rapped the table and shook his head in mock dismay.
‘Thought crimes, so it is,’ he said.
‘Badge crimes,’ Tully said. At which point Limbo got up on the table and addressed the tattie-customers in their loosened ties.
‘Oyez, oyez,’ he said. ‘After careful adjudication by his peers, it is hereby pronounced that Robert McCloy, fresh from the bus, and late, too, is guilty of crimes against decent standards in the sporting of punk badges.’
‘Hear, hear,’ I said with my mouth full.
‘My learned friends,’ Limbo continued. ‘Though the defendant claims to oppose America in its abuses of international law, he is guilty of badge crimes.’
‘Boys … boys …’ Clogs said.
‘This is now a proven fact. He shall be taken from this place …’ – Hogg and Tully grabbed Clogs, pinned him to the chair, and started flicking his ears – ‘… and subjected to the severest punishment allowed by law, that he be held in a box bedroom, and that he be forced to listen to the music of Phil Collins until he be dead.’
*
In Piccadilly Gardens, Tully rolled in a bed of dandelions, and then, carrying the dregs of Limbo’s wine, he climbed up a statue of James Watt. ‘Oi, buddy,’ he shouted at a passing stranger. ‘What does a gentleman do in Manchester if he wants an afternoon cocktail?’
‘Whistle for it, mate,’ the man said.
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you, indeed. I am presently engaged in shagging one of your premier monuments. Toodle-pip!’
‘The Scots steamers,’ Tibbs said, standing next to me, ‘paying homage to the inventor of steam.’
‘Engine,’ Clogs said. ‘He invented the engine. Or improved it. Something like that.’ We watched Tully kissing the master’s bronze face and offering the sky a dram. ‘Excellent. We have a whole weekend of show-offs and memorials.’
‘Hey, Manchester,’ Tully shouted over the gardens, his arm crooked around James Watt’s neck. ‘We had it all, duck.’
He held up the bottle. The sun caught it.
‘A television set and a packet of fags.’
I think he imagined everyone below him, all the ordinary people of the city, would know the films he was quoting from, that they’d know them by heart, having somehow lived in them all their days.
7
We saw ‘Britannia Hotel’ in red neon and a sign saying ‘Happy Hour’. I think the Housemartins song of that name was in the charts at the time, because Limbo was singing it loudly as he stormed up the hotel steps, disappearing through the revolving doors into a Valhalla of tartan carpet.
Five o’clock. All pints eighty pence.
‘Look, Noodles,’ Tully said, hanging back. By the entrance, a bronze figure of a soldier in a Tommy helmet holding a rifle with a long bayonet. Tully touched the soldier’s boot and read out the words. ‘To the enduring memory of those members of the staff of S & J Watts & Co., who laid down their lives for the
ir King and country in the cause of truth, justice and freedom during the Great War.’ He ran a finger down the names and stopped at one of them, J. T. Dawson. ‘No relation,’ he said, ‘but how would I know?’
A pigeon hopped onto the steps.
‘It’s weird what Limbo said earlier on,’ I began. ‘It was a joke but it’s the sort of idea that sticks with me. He said I would’ve been a bad bet in the trenches. Him and Tibbs and Hogg would’ve been first over the top, wouldn’t they?’
‘Definitely,’ Tully said.
‘They’d run into the bullets.’
‘Chasing a football probably. Especially Tibbs, kicking it into no man’s land. And you’d be in the officers’ mess, Noodles, writing a poem.’
‘Where would you be, Tully?’ He dropped his cigarette and the pigeon scarpered. He put his arm around my neck.
‘I’d be shivering in the trench,’ he said. ‘Shell-shocked.’ I leaned back to look at him to see if he was being serious.
‘Really? That’s how you see it?’
‘Yip. There’s always one.’
We stood there looking at one another.
‘Are you all right, Tully?’
‘I just want to get so drunk,’ he said.
I didn’t properly register what he was saying. At that age, you can’t speak about courage or what kind will be required or how much. He looked back at the memorial before staring into the street and taking a deep breath. ‘That was my da’s story,’ he said. ‘National Service. Best years of his life, apparently.’
‘That’s the kind of thing they say.’
‘Learning how to box. How to be a man. What sort of poor bastard thinks being stuck in a Malayan swamp is the best gig they ever had?’
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